And the reason you have, is because back in the early 1990s, a
woman named Kim Polese lead development of the programming
language as a product manager at Sun Microsystems.

The product went nuts, and by 1996, Kim and the programmers who
actually built Java decided to capitalize on their success and
leave Sun to start their own company. They called it Marimba.

Marimba got huge amounts of hype. It got a BusinessWeek cover, which used to mean
something. There was a cover story in Red Herring, which used to
exist.

Then Marimba flopped.

The problem was that all the publicity came when Marimba had only
been in business four months – and they only had four months of
code written.

"For decades," says a still-active seriel entrepreneur from the
era, "that company had to deal with the fact that every
programmer in the world who had to use their technology thought
of them as just being hype – a big company full of hot air."

Eventually, Marimba pivoted and sold to BMC Software in Houston
for a little more than twice the amount of venture capital it
raised.

Why do we bring all this up?

Because the story of Marimba kind of reminds of another startup,
on that's red hot right now – Quora.

Like Marimba's was, Quora's hype is white hot. A Quora investor
recently told us the startup wouldn't sell right now for a price
less than $1 billion.

Marimba was hyped because its founders, best known for their work
at the prior company. Quora gets a lot of hype because its
cofounders, Adam D'Angelo and Charlie Cheever, were early Facebook employees.

Marimba's hype created unreasonable expectations for new users.
Most tried it and walked away disappointed. It was supposed to be
a way for companies to push news stories to people's desktops. It
ended up being a tool used to push software updates.

Quora's hype is also creating unreasonable expectations for new
users. When New York Times columnist David Pogue tried the site, he was under the
impression it would be able to help him find a camp for his kid.
He came away disappointed and without an answer.

He ended his review with a question for Quora: "Why not make this
thing easier for normal people to figure out?”